Resilience: The Invisible Foundation of Emergency Notification

In the simplest terms, resilience refers to the ability for something to remain operational while experiencing a critical event or adversity. Resilience can apply to anything from personality traits to emergency notification systems, but for the purposes of this blog we’ll focus on the latter. It is extremely important for an emergency notification system (ENS) to be resilient to avoid outages and enable users to send critical alerts when they need to most. So how does an ENS become more resilient? The difficulty lies in the innate nature of the system itself. An ENS is critical to an organization during an emergency, but what if that emergency itself also is having an effect on the ENS’s ability to operate? This is why it’s critical for an ENS to be resilient regardless of the demands an emergency may place on your technological infrastructure, so it can be operational when you may not be. For any ENS, the key to resilience is redundancy in the form of multiple operation centers that can be leveraged in the event that any one is forced offline due to a weather event, act of terrorism, etc. By utilizing multiple Network Operation Centers (NOCs) and Data Centers, an ENS can stay operational at all times, even if one of the centers experiences an outage. This concept of redundancy to create a no-single-point-of-failure system must be applied to every physical and virtual aspect of an ENS to ensure 100% availability at all times. While having multiple NOCs and Data Centers is important for physical components, that redundancy becomes irrelevant if the web interface that users log into to send messages is experiencing an outage. For that reason, replication is critical for all user-facing components like websites as well as back-end physical components. Interested in learning more about what makes an ENS resilient and how to ensure your messages get sent, no matter the circumstances? Check out our upcoming webinar, Why Messages Fail: Ensuring Information Flows During Emergencies with Everbridge’s own SVP of Product Management, Claudia Dent, and Senior Solutions Consultant, Tom Crane. Our speakers will discuss how to ensure your critical alerts reach their recipients, both from an infrastructure and message content perspective. Learn more about Everbridge and how it can help you get the right message, to the right people, at the right time.